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‘Especially in this country, I believe you craved me. You didn't comprehend it but you craved me, to remove some of your own shame.” The performer, the 42-year-old Canadian humorist who has made her home in the UK for almost 20 years, has brought her newly minted fourth child. She removes her breast pumps so they avoid making an annoying sound. The initial impression you observe is the incredible ability of this woman, who can fully beam maternal love while forming coherent ideas in complete phrases, and without getting distracted.

The second thing you notice is what she’s famous for – a authentic, unapologetic audacity, a rejection of affectation and duplicity. When she sprang on to the UK alternative comedy scene in 2008, her provocation was that she was exceptionally beautiful and made no attempt not to know it. “Aiming for stylish or beautiful was seen as appealing to men,” she states of the that period, “which was the antithesis of what a funny person would do. It was a fashion to be self-deprecating. If you performed in a stylish dress with your little push-up bra and heels, like, ‘I think I’m gorgeous,’ that would be seen as really alienating, but I did it because that’s what I wanted.”

Then there was her routines, which she summarises simply: “Women, especially, craved someone to appear and be like: ‘Hey, that’s OK. You can be a advocate for equality and have a boob job and have been a bit of a slag for a while. You can be flawed as a mother, as a significant other and as a selector of men. You can be someone who is afraid of men, but is confident enough to slag them off; you don’t have to be nice to them the all the time.’”

‘If you took to the stage in your little push-up bra and heels, that would be seen as really off-putting’

The drumbeat to that is an focus on what’s authentic: if you have your child with you, you most likely have your feeding equipment; if you have the profile of a youth, you’ve most likely received treatments; if you want to reduce, well, there are medications for that. “I’m not on any yet, but I’ll think about them when I’ve stopped feeding,” she says. It gets to the heart of how female emancipation is viewed, which in my view hasn’t really changed in the past 50 years: freedom means looking great but never thinking about it; being universally desired, but without pursuing the male gaze; having an impermeable sense of self which perish the thought you would ever alter cosmetically; and coupled with all that, women, especially, are expected to never think about money but nevertheless prosper under the demands of current financial conditions. All of which is kept afloat by the majority of us pretending, most of the time.

“For a while people reacted: ‘What? She just speaks about things?’ But I’m not trying to be challenging all the time. My personal stories, choices and missteps, they live in this space between confidence and shame. It took place, I discuss it, and maybe reprieve comes out of the jokes. I love sharing secrets; I want people to confide in me their secrets. I want to know missteps people have made. I don’t know why I’m so keen for it, but I sense it like a connection.”

Ryan spent her childhood in Sarnia, Ontario, a place that was not especially wealthy or urban and had a vibrant local performance arts scene. Her dad managed an technical company, her mother was in IT, and they anticipated a lot of her because she was bright, a perfectionist. She longed to get out from the age of about seven. “It was the kind of town where people are very pleased to live close to their parents and remain there for a long time and have one another's children. When I visit now, all these kids look really recognizable to me, because I was raised with both their parents.” But isn't it true she partnered with her own first love? She traveled back to Sarnia, reconnected with Bobby Kootstra, who she saw as a teenager, and now – six years later – they have three children together, plus Violet, now 16, who Ryan had brought up until then as a solo mom. “Right,” says Ryan. “Sometimes I think there’s a different path where I haven’t done that, and it’s still just Violet and me, stylish, cosmopolitan, mobile. But we can’t fully escape where we started, it turns out.”

‘We cannot completely leave behind where we came from’

She managed to leave for a bit, aged 18, and moved to Toronto, which she adored. These were the period working there, which has been a further cause of controversy, not just that she worked – and liked the job – in a topless bar (except this is a misconception: “You would be let go for being topless; you’re not allowed to take your shirt off”), but also for a bit in one of her sets where she discussed giving a manager a sexual favor in return for being allowed to go home early. It violated so many red lines – what even was that? Manipulation? Transaction? Predatory behavior? Unsisterliness (towards whoever it was who had to stay late so she could leave early)? Whatever it was, you certainly were not meant to joke about it.

Ryan was shocked that her fellatio sequence generated controversy – she was fond of the guy! She also wanted to go home early. But it revealed something larger: a deliberate rigidity around sex, a sense that the consequence of the #MeToo movement was demonstrative modesty. “I’ve always found this fascinating, in arguments about sex, permission and manipulation, the people who don’t understand the subtlety of it. Therefore if this is abuse, why isn’t that abuse?” She references the equating of certain comments to lyrics in popular music. “Certain people said: ‘Well, how’s that dissimilar?’ I thought: ‘How is it comparable?’”

She would not have come to London in 2008 had it not been for her partner at the time. “Everyone said: ‘Don’t go to London, they have rats there.’ And I found it difficult, because I was suddenly broke.”

‘I felt confident I had jokes’

She got a job in sales, was diagnosed lupus, which can sometimes make it challenging to get pregnant, and at 23, chose to try to have a baby. “When you’re first told you have something – I was quite unwell at the time – you go to the worst-case scenario. My reasoning with my boyfriend was, we’ve had so many problems, if we haven't separated by now, we never will. Now I see how long life is, and how many things can transform. But at 23, I was unaware.” She succeeded in get pregnant and had Violet.

The next bit sounds as white-knuckle as a chaotic comedy film. While on time off, she would care for Violet in the day and try to break into comedy in the evening, taking her daughter with her. She knew from her sales job that she had no problem winning people over, and she had faith in her fast thinking from her time at Hooters; more than that, she says plainly, “I knew I had jokes.” The whole scene was permeated with discrimination – she won a prestigious comedy award in 2008, just over a year after she’d started performing, a prize that was conceived in the context of a ongoing debate about whether women could be funny